Fairfax County School Board To Appeal Ruling Against Racial Balancing Efforts

The Fairfax County School Board has filed an appeal challenging a recent court ruling against controversial new admissions procedures at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ), a prestigious magnet school in Alexandria, Virginia. 

The new admissions policy was intended to increase the proportion of black and Hispanic students at the school. It was struck down in late February by Judge Claude M. Hilton of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, who ruled that the new policy “has had, and will have, a substantial disparate impact on Asian American applicants to TJ.” 

Before the challenged admissions policy was put in place, 73 percent of TJ students were Asian American. In 2021, the school was only 1 percent black and 3.3 percent Hispanic in a county in which 10 percent and 16 percent of the population is black and Hispanic, respectively. This led to the school being described by Didi Elsyad, who was one of the six black students in her grade at TJ, as “segregation in its modern form.” 

In 2020, following the death of George Floyd, the Fairfax County School Board made sweeping changes to the school’s admissions policy for the 2021-2022 school year. Formerly, applicants were required to take three hours of standardized tests to proceed to the semifinalist round of admissions to TJ, which accepts students from across several districts in Northern Virginia. The new policy nixed the standardized testing in favor of requiring applicants to have taken or be enrolled in middle school honors classes that cover the same material as the standardized tests. The school board also added a “student experience sheet” that allowed TJ’s admissions team to account for household income, learning disabilities, and whether the applicant is a native English speaker. The policy also placed a percentage cap on the number of students coming from each feeder middle school. 

The changes had a staggering effect: According to the lawsuit, the class of 2024 was 73 percent Asian, while the class of 2025 is 54 percent Asian. Meanwhile, the share of black students increased from less than 1 percent in the 2024 class to 7 percent in the 2025 class, and the share of Hispanic students increased from 3.3 percent to 11 percent. 

After the new admissions policy was announced, 17 Northern Virginia families, many of them pa